"sharper" and "shark" (nouns)

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Wed Oct 3 16:17:49 UTC 2007


On 10/3/07, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> The earliest "card sharper" is 1850; the earliest "card sharp" is 1876.
>
> OED2 does not have "card shark"!

As I just posted in the other thread, we now have "card sharp" from
1858 and "card shark" from 1884:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003448.html
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0509a&L=ads-l&P=18683

--Ben Zimmer

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